


The Flower Garden

by MSaga



Category: Flight Rising
Genre: Gen, Myth-esque, Not my lair, just a friend's
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-21
Updated: 2020-03-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:42:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23247949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MSaga/pseuds/MSaga
Summary: Story One of Tales from the Catacombs... if I ever get around to writing more.Iugentum has lived in the Marutian Catacombs all his life, never leaving to so much as see the sun. But when a trader tells him of something he's never seen before, Iugentum will do anything to bring it into the Catacombs.





	The Flower Garden

Once, there was a dragon who loved flowers. He had never seen any, but loved them just the same. He lived in the depths of the Catacombs, a hive of experimental magic and strange creations.  


While golems and magic mirrors were quite common down there, not a single drop of sunlight reached his home, and so flowers would not grow. Nothing but fungi and bacteria survived. Nothing else could.  


If it weren’t for the collectors, Iugentum might have gone his entire life without knowing of the existence of flowers, but one, newly returned from the Strand, was selling her wares outside the Glassworks, just as he was passing.  


“Trinkets! Shards! See the latest papers, stolen from the Arcanist himself! All new, straight from the Surface!”  


Hearing the call, and always a bit curious, he wandered over to paw through her wares. The bloodstone and fish scales did not excite him, and even the more finished sculptures failed to catch his eye. He flicked open a locket that rattled when shook to see if it contained something more interesting. The object fell out, looking like crumpled paper. He picked it up, to see its strange and colorful shape, as the seller noticed his find and said  


“Oh, so you got that thing unjammed? What was inside?”  


She reached forward, grabbing it out of his claws, only to hold it up to her lantern and sigh.  


“Only a dried rose. And here I thought there’d be something valuable.”  


With that, she crushed the rose in her palm and politely asked if he wanted the locket.  


He shook his head and instead requested she explain to him what a rose was, to which she began to laugh before saying  


“It’s a kind of plant, from above. They don’t grow down here.”  


“Why not?”  


“Take your pick. No sunlight, no good soil, no pollinators, too much magical contamination…”  


“What do they look like alive?”  


To his last inquiry, she sighed and pulled out a faded white paper packet. The outside showed a vibrant garden of red roses, out under a beaming yellow sun. He almost couldn’t believe something like that could exist.  


“Sometimes I sell these as Second Age artifacts to the dumber historians, who don’t know these are used in the Labyrinth to renew plant beds. You can’t use these down here, but that is what the roses look like up there.”  


Even when told he could not truly grow the beautiful flowers down in his home, Iugentum still insisted on buying them, claiming he only wanted them for the art. The seller watched him walk away with a confused frown, not knowing what he would do next, but rather glad she wouldn’t be around to see it happen.  


He searched out the libraries of the catacombs, looking for information on these bright things. He spoke to anyone who might have even the vaguest hints of knowledge on how to make the impossibilities bloom. He sought out the black market trader, Emrikor, in the shadowy alleys of the cauldron.  


Everyone said the same thing.  


“No light, and nothing to eat? They cannot grow down here.”  


So Iugentum turned to his studies.  


The magic that nearly flowed through the air deep within the Catacombs, he found after much experimentation, could substitute for sunlight. The ivy and ferns he bought at high prices from the traders proved the energy they needed could just as easily come from the currents as from the sun. The soil, though…  


Iugentum eventually found, through much trial and error, that the magic-saturated air negatively affected the nutrients in the soil. It- altered them, so far as he could tell, such that they became effectively unusable to the blooms he was determined to see.  


Any soil brought into the depths reacted the same way- within a week, the plants would starve for lack of nutrients, no matter how he concentrated the magic.  


He thought on this matter. Thought and thought until his wings became tattered from lack of care. Thought and thought until his eyes burned with the gears turning. Thought and thought as weeks and months went by. Thought and thought until, in the depths and spirals of the rabbit hole, he hit upon a solution.  


“If”, he muttered, “If the soil has no nutrients, and flowers need nutrients, then I simply need to give them a source. Just a source. And that, I can do.”  


So he worked through the days and nights that followed, in turns raving and whispering his plans and his joy at finally seeing the painted beauties in reality.  


And when he had finally finished, he looked in the mirror and saw glorious black roses in full bloom.  


_For everyone knows nothing grows in the catacombs  
Except for the roses of Iugentum.  
He bred them, loved them and kept them. And when he realized there was nothing to eat,  
He did what he had to.  
He provided._


End file.
